“The Meaning of Life” and Responsible Parenthood

Everyone knows Monty Python. The British comedy troupe’s show, movies, and comedic style have thoroughly permeated culture, and not just popular culture. Indeed, the song “Every Sperm Is Sacred” from The Meaning of Life—Monty Python’s 1983 satirical comedy film attempting to make sense of existence—has become a shorthand refutation of Catholic sexual teaching, especially its prohibition of artificial contraception. The song is all too familiar to the beleaguered defenders of Catholic teaching. Sung in Meaning by a patriarch of a poor family with an absurd number of children, it ‘defends’ the Catholic view in a manner meant to make it seem ridiculous.

Despite the song’s intention as a humorous satire, it has overstepped the boundaries of mere comedy among modern critics of Catholic sexual teaching. Whether or not the Pythons intended their satire to be taken seriously, many viewers have done just that in, for example, law journal articles advocating artificial insemination and books advocating abortion. Therefore, given the prominence of the anti-Catholic argument that the satire humorously advances and has come to reinforce, it is not only appropriate but also necessary to examine the contents of both the song and its supporting scenes in the film. Doing so through the lens of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and its attendant documents proves the song’s satirical argument is entirely superficial.

The song appears in a section of Meaning titled, “The Miracle of Birth, Part II: The Third World.” In it, as a working-class man approaches his home, a stork drops a child down the chimney. “Bloody hell,” he curses in reaction. The birth barely registers to his miserable dish-washing wife within, who lets the child drop onto the floor, wearily asking another child to retrieve it. The father’s entry reveals a full domestic Malthusian nightmare: dozens of children, all hungry, dirty, and poor. He then announces to them that he is unemployed and must sell them off for medical experiments to make ends meet. “God has blessed us so much, I can’t afford to feed you anymore,” he explains. When his children ask why he avoided artificial contraception, he says he cannot because he and their mom are Catholic: the Church won’t “let me wear one of those little rubber things.” The song “Every Sperm Is Sacred” elaborates by poking fun at the Catholic view of contraception: “…Every sperm is sacred/Every sperm is great/If a sperm is wasted/God gets quite irate…” As the seemingly infinite children then march disconsolately from the house toward their grim fate, Protestant neighbors observe in disgust, thankful that their rejection of “Papist claptrap” enables rational sexual relations.

All of this criticizes the Catholic view of contraception through exaggerated yet admittedly effective means. It amounts to a definite ‘yes’ to the question posed by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae: “Granted the conditions of life today…would not a revision of the ethical norms…seem to be advisable, especially when it is considered that they cannot be observed without sacrifices, sometimes heroic sacrifices?” By extending Catholic doctrine to an absurd yet somewhat plausible situation, The Meaning of Life tests the Catholic view and finds it wanting. Abandoning this view, the admittedly comical satire suggests seriously through implication, would improve society.

Yet this satirical presentation contains deficiencies that the seriousness of its implied message makes it fair to point out. Most basically, the father rejects children, as his utter disgust upon the stork’s arrival reveals. Yet the Theology of the Body says all conjugal acts must be open to children. In subverting this principle, contraception constitutes what Pope John Paul II in Man and Woman He Created Them called an “essential evil” with its “artificial separation of the [the unitive and procreative] meanings in the conjugal act.” This violates the “communio personarum” or “communion of persons” that John Paul II—writing pre-papacy in Love and Responsibility as Bishop Karol Wojtyla—argued could alone elevate conjugal relations from utilitarianism (a philosophy of pleasure maximization that amounts to “a programme of thoroughgoing egoism quite incapable of evolving into authentic altruism”). As both are of this mindset, neither contraception nor the father’s attitude can provide meaningful communion, dooming this marriage to one of two extremes: if the husband continues without contraception, they will reproduce from bare functionality; yet embracing it would render his wife a mere instrument of his own pleasure.

Admittedly, contraception would superficially ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of too many children, but such thinking reveals deeper marital problems than contraception could paper over. For the massive Catholic brood depicted shows that, since the husband eschews contraception, the spouses are likely engaging in the conjugal act as frequently as possible. Based on the wife’s apparent misery, the husband probably maximizes his own pleasure at her expense. As Woyjtyla warned in Love and Responsibility, it is possible that “[i]f a woman does not obtain natural gratification from the sexual act there is a danger that her experience of it will be qualitatively inferior, will not involve her fully as a person.”

If Meaning condemns with laughter the husband’s nymphomania, then it is in the right; if it fails to realize its satirical scenario’s serious implications, then it offers as the only alternative to the Catholic view a complete surrender to unrestrained sexual desire which reduces people to mere instruments of one another’s pleasure. Yes, introducing contraception would reduce the number of children. But choosing that rather than periodic abstinence (as the Church prescribes) eliminates what could restrain the sexual appetites of the husband. So their marriage would not necessarily improve. More likely, the wife would become even more of a vehicle for her husband’s pleasure than before.

But what to do about the children? Little aside from adoption could conclude this scenario happily. Yet The Meaning of Life ignores responsible parenthood, an idea central to the Catholic teaching that proceeds from the Theology of the Body. These spouses only know they must reproduce without artificial contraception. But the full teaching of the Faith appeals to responsible parenthood precisely for situations—such as theirs—in which bringing too many children into a household would only immiserate. As Pope Paul VI explained in Humane Vitae: “In relation to…economic…and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised…by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even an indeterminate period, a new birth.” Using natural fertility cycles, these spouses could have limited their number of offspring without contravening Catholic doctrine and would have strengthened their marriage as a result. The Church does not teach that every sperm is sacred, but that every life is sacred.

Monty Python will likely remain a comic force in the culture for years to come. It’s one thing to laugh along, but it’s another to buy into the serious misconceptions that the group’s satirical work spreads. And Catholics need not feel threatened by “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” either. The Theology of the Body offers a clear corrective to the ignorance on which the satire depends. Those in academia and culture who continue to lean on the song and the purportedly serious points its satire produces as a pithy, amusing, and legitimate rejoinder to Catholic sexual teaching ought to find better arguments. And those of us sympathetic to the Catholic view have a duty to spread it and to rebut alternatives—not just for the sake of the Church, but for the sake of couples everywhere.

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Jack Butler, a 2015 graduate of Hillsdale College, is a writer living in Washington, D.C.